Pete Hegseth Has Lost Over $1 Billion in Fighter Jet Parts

Did Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth think it was too woke to keep track of $1.3 billion worth of fighter jet parts?

A report published Monday by the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Defense has not kept adequate records of parts for the F-35 Lightning II, which are worth an estimated $31 billion in total.

As of March, 17,000 parts that were in maintenance or repair were missing from the F-35 Joint Program Office’s enterprise logistics management system. The total value of the parts was estimated to be $1.3 billion, but DOD officials stated that the value could be as high as $2.5 billion when accounting for other burden costs.

The GAO also uncovered evidence that suggested serious data quality issues. Only 29 percent of the records in a December 2025 contract data requirements list contained serial numbers, and six percent of records showed an acquisition cost of $0.01 or less.

This report comes as the House of Representatives is poised to vote on a procedural motion on Hegseth’s impeachment Tuesday evening. Outgoing Republican Representative Thomas Massie’s 34-page impeachment resolution accuses Hegseth of committing a slew of impeachable offenses by illegally waging war against Iran, suppressing free speech, ignoring laws intended to minimize civilian casualties, and overseeing extrajudicial killings and the kidnapping of a foreign leader. Hegseth claimed Tuesday that not only were his contested actions lawful, but they also resulted in military victories.

President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency products have plummeted in value following Republicans’ massive defeat in the midterm elections last week.

The Washington Sun reports that $WLFI, the “governance token” from Trump’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial, has dropped to $1.11 after a high of $40 last year. The meme coin marked by first lady Melania Trump, MELANIA, lost half its value after the midterms and has fallen 99.6 percent since last year.

Democrats’ plan to investigate Trump’s crypto products appears to be the main reason for their drop in value. Zach Everson, the research director at nonprofit Public Citizen, told the Sun, “This is all now worthless.”

“It’s the lame-duck period of Trump’s crypto investments: His political influence is waning and so is interest in his crypto offerings,” Everson said. “Not that there should have been any doubt, but these price drops clearly show how much the market for Trump’s crypto products relies on his political power.”

Everson calculated that Trump’s crypto investors have lost $4.7 billion. Trump, meanwhile, has increased his net worth by $3 billion in his second term as president, although he lost more than $200 million thanks to his stocks tanking after the midterms.

Trump tried to defend his increased wealth on 60 Minutes on Sunday, claiming that he devotes “almost no time to my net worth” and dismissed concerns about the foreign entities that invest in World Liberty Financial, such as the United Arab Emirates. In less than two weeks, he’s hosting a dinner for the top 185 holders of his meme coin, GetTrumpMemes.com, and the top 29 buyers get an invite to a “VIP Reception with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT.” The top four get an 18-karat gold “Trump Victory” watch. It seems that Trump’s cash grab will continue as long as he is allowed.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy may be gone from the MAGA agenda, but their underlings from the Department of Government Efficiency are still wreaking havoc across the government.

Sam Corcos, a former DOGE staffer who was reassigned to the Technology Transformation Services office in the General Services Administration, or GSA, has resurrected one of Musk’s most unpopular mandates. On Friday, Corcos ordered more than 200 of his coworkers to provide daily reports about their job and responsibilities to him via email, The Washington Sun reported on Tuesday.

“The purpose of these updates is to help us better understand what everyone is working on, give TTS Front Office a clearer picture of progress across the organization, and identify any blockers,” Corcos wrote.

In order to comply with Corcos’s directive, some GSA employees must send in a summary of the work they completed that day, a plan for their work the next day, and any problems they need assistance to solve.

“Failure to comply may result in adverse action,” Corcos noted in his email.

But affected federal employees do not seem open to Corcos’s new rules, likening the initiative to Musk’s notoriously unsuccessful “five things” email requirement. One GSA employee told the Sun that the message is indicative of Corcos’s “basic distrust in and underestimation of federal workers.”

Another GSA staffer explained to the Sun that it didn’t feel like Corcos was genuinely interested in helping the agency surface problems but that it instead “feels like they’re trying to mess with our heads again.”

Weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, Musk threatened thousands of federal employees with immediate termination if they failed to obey a similar self-report mandate, which required government workers to identify five things that they achieved in the previous week. The initiative was intended to radically size down the government, but it instead posed a major security threat and was shut down within days by the Office of Personnel Management.

On Monday night, President Donald Trump had the bright idea to call C-SPAN and rant on the air.

The call began with an unidentified woman laughing in the background. Then viewers got to hear Trump rant about immigrant drug dealers and rapists, even after the interviewer pointed out that Trump had expressed sympathy for working immigrants who paid taxes in a 60 Minutes interview that aired the day before.

Trump incorrectly claimed that the U.S. government hadn’t put the same pressure on those kinds of immigrants, and then he abruptly pivoted to the U.S.’s takeover of Venezuela, talking about how great he believes it’s going. He mentioned how the U.S. has taken “hundreds of billions of dollars and millions and millions of barrels of oil” from the country.

The president continued to rant about having “won” Venezuela and then how he won Iran, going on about how the Middle Eastern country wants to make a deal with him but “won’t say that.” When asked how much longer the war would go, he didn’t answer the question, claiming that he’d taken out the country’s nuclear program and that the country was in shambles.

Why Trump picked C-SPAN is anyone’s guess, considering that his usual network of choice for phone calls is Fox News. But on Monday night, viewers of the public access cable channel got to hear Trump’s delusions continue even after a Democratic midterm landslide. We seem to be in for another two years of clear cognitive decline.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed Tuesday that he was being threatened with impeachment for being too good at his job.

Speaking at a press conference at the Pentagon, Hegseth began by denying any wrongdoing and claiming that the United States had actually won victories in both Iran and Venezuela.

“For the first time in American history, a Cabinet secretary overseeing America’s military is being attacked, not for losing conflicts with our enemies, but for winning them. Condemned not for defeat but for military victory,” he said.

Of course, that’s not why he’s being impeached at all: Outgoing Republican Representative Thomas Massie’s 34-page impeachment resolution accuses Hegseth of committing a slew of impeachable offenses by illegally waging war against Iran, suppressing free speech, ignoring laws intended to minimize civilian casualties, and overseeing extrajudicial killings and the kidnapping of a foreign leader. Hegseth insisted that these were not only lawful operations, but victories.

Hegseth claimed that efforts to remove him were being championed by “one disgruntled and defeated congressman,” and that people in the media would never admit to the military’s successes because they “hate the president more than [they] love our country or our troops.”

Hegseth also argued that the impeachment efforts were targeting something bigger than just one delusional Defense secretary. “Make no mistake about what is happening. This is not about me,” he said.

“Put the secretary on trial today, and the men and women who carried out those orders tomorrow,” he added. “If they want to come for the warriors, they’re going to have to come through me.”

Hegseth’s feeble DARVO manipulation strategy crumbles under the slightest pressure. As valorous of a gesture as that may appear, the only person to blame for the crimes committed by U.S. service members is the guy who ordered them—and his boss.

Speaking of President Donald Trump, Hegseth compared his situation to the president’s previous two impeachments.

“Now they’re trying a third time,” Hegseth said. “This time against a member of his Cabinet. They will fail again. And if standing with President Trump puts me in that company, I’ll take that company every day of the week.”

If impeachment is a badge of honor to Hegseth, it’s no wonder he has such backwards ideas about victories and defeats.